List of companies that I'd like to be investigated for corruption and anti trust abuses:
1. Alphabet/Google
2. Apple
3. Facebook
4. Match Group
Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.
Reasons:
For Google, the biggest problem is their bundling of Chrome, YouTube, Gmail if you want to have Google certified android phone that has the Google play store. Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too.
The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.
For Apple, it's their app store. The app store needs to be eliminated. Apple has a problem with not allowing competing browser engines on iOS and misleading people by saying it's for privacy reason. Eliminating the control of the App store from Apple is going to fix the problem.
For Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp should be spun off to their own entities.
For Match group, break off tinder into a separate company. And prevent any future dating app accusations by Match group or Tinder. NO MERGERS.
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From the Chinese side:
I'd like to see Alibaba group and Tencent being investigated.
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Edit: replying to calls below for travel industry.
The travel industry is already competitive enough, and the situation in these areas should be reviewed after a year or two.
For now, these are the critical problems for tech. Their control is taking the breath away from smaller companies and reducing innovation.
Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, Grindr, Once, Happn, and a few other apps that are probably unique to Europe come to mind as alternatives just from the top of my head.
Doesn't seem terribly monopolized to me, especially if you factor in that one person often uses multiple of those apps.
Here’s a fun fact. If you read the Match Group annual reports, they’ll often say that their biggest US competitor is Facebook, Instagram and other social media sites.
> For Google, the biggest problem is their bundling of Chrome, YouTube, Gmail if you want to have Google certified android phone that has the Google play store.
I think it's much more than that.
Google makes apps and services. Google makes the platforms apps run on (Android, ChromeOS, Chrome [web + electron], Stadia). Google makes the services used to monetize apps (AdSense). Google makes the services used to distribute apps (Google Play Store, Stadia). Google makes the services used to find apps and services (Google Search, Google Maps, Google Play Store). And that's not to mention the deployment platforms, communication platforms, payment platforms, analytics platforms, development tools, content hosting services, etc.
They have so much control that you can't hope to compete with any of their established apps or services - no matter how much better your own product might be. All you can to is try to make something new and get big enough that Google can't take you on directly.
To play Devil's advocate, how many of those would exist if they had been separate. How much innovation is restricted by splitting entities.
Android was motivated to compete with Apple. The Play Store and Chrome Web Store required platform ownership for integration and optimization. Intertwined services demand mutual optimization. Many other Google products would likely struggle as startups, requiring massive scale to become profitable, if even possible. Most only exist because ads pay for them and they may contribute to improving ads.
Something must absolutely be done to allow competing browser engines on iOS, such an anti-competitive behaviour is astonishing. How much money did Apple make thanks to not allowing the Web to be a viable alternative to native apps on its platform?
Over the past 10 years, how many companies chose to build native apps for iOS instead of web apps running everywhere? How many people bought iOS devices instead of competing products because of that rich app ecosystem (working only on iOS devices)? How much money did they make through the App Store fee that app developers could have saved if Web Apps had been a viable option? How much money was poured in the native industry instead of the Web?
Apple has been preventing the growth of the Web as an app platform for years, it's time for a change, and it's time they pay for it.
In what universe is Apple (a private company) responsible for the growth of the Web as an app platform? (which was not a design consideration when the web was invented). And who could make a sincere argument of being damaged by Apple not caring enough? Is it Apple's responsibility to make your life easier? In that case I've got a long list of companies to sue...
Only if Apple can have two versions of iOS on offer: one that is locked down and possibly/putatively safe; the other that is wild-west, Android-like in quality of store offerings, with all the tracking issues that goes with that. I know which one I'd choose, and it isn't the latter; my suspicion is that the market would make the same decision.
I'd still put Facebook as the #1 issue, since WhatsApp and Instagram clearly should exist separately.
Google seems iffier, since Chrome at least would never be viable as a standalone product (as the fates of Mozilla and Opera have taught us).
Totally agree that Match group is an interesting under-the-radar one. It's shocking how much of the market they control with all their "competing" apps.
> Chrome at least would never be viable as a standalone product (as the fates of Mozilla and Opera have taught us).
Firefox has been viable as a standalone product for over a decade because Google pays for being the default search engine. This is roughly viable with Chrome being around, it would be even more viable if Chrome was not around.
Mozilla and Opera aren't viable because of Chrome. Chrome is arguably more polished because Google pours more money into its development, more readily available because Google can lobby/buy/enforce its inclusion as the default browser, and free because Google makes money from the information it collects through it.
You can't compete with Chrome when your primary merit is simply not being Google. Forcing Google to spin-off Chrome should have been done earlier though, before Microsoft had a stake on the engine. Now additional steps need to be taken to ensure that spinning off Chrome will not actually kill competition; with an independent Chrome, we can count on Google cutting down on Mozilla's funding since Google wouldn't be any longer in danger of being ruled as a browser monopoly.
>Totally agree that Match group is an interesting under-the-radar one. It's shocking how much of the market they control with all their "competing" apps.
I wonder if this means that we should all start starting dating app companies, given that apparently it's a guaranteed sale if you can attract enough users. We could start the "match group group," stamping out standardized dating apps and putting proven amounts of brand-building effort into each one, and selling them to Match Group at a repeatable price.
“ Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.”
I know someone working on DOJ’s case vs G search, yet I haven’t heard any decent proposals to solve the problem. This is one. Simple and could spark a lot of innovation. (Probably has drawbacks that I haven’t considered yet.)
I'm not sure splitting off the crawler would have the effect you want it to. Crawling is hard, but actually one of the easier parts of building a search engine. There are less complete, but still pretty impressive public crawls available already, like Common Crawl.
The harder problem is what you do with the result of the crawl once you have it. You need to index it. This is one of Google's deepest moats. Being able to serve any of hundreds of billions of documents in milliseconds requires an enormous amount of infrastructure and hundreds of careers worth of difficult software engineering.
I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking. Generally a new ranking technique requires some new information to be associated with each document in the index, e.g. some precomputed scores that describe the document's quality or fitness for different kinds of queries. At query time, you're often just weighting and comparing these scores across documents.
If you had Google's index, you'd be a long way towards being able to replicate Google's results, but I don't think that would lead to the kind of innovation you're hoping for.
To expand on this idea: Place the crawler under a non-profit such as the Internet Archive, so the results can serve the public & the commercial agreements can fund their broader archival efforts too.
Sounds like a similar idea to the way the UK broke BTs hold on the internet market. They were forced to split the infrastructure into BT OpenReach and then BT joins all the other ISPs in paying for the lines from OpenReach.
One possible issue is that the users of the data may place different prominence on a particular URL, and may decide that it warrants more frequent crawling.
For site owners, it may prove to be lower maintenance to simply whitelist such a bot for crawling, though on the downside they may want to pick and choose which search engines can index it, and since the crawl (assumedly) would use one UA it would complicate how site owners can tell respective search engines what they're allowed to do with the crawl data.
I would like an investigation in to data sharing in the travel industry. Airlines and cartels thereof, credit card companies, airports, hotels, oldschool booking networks (Amadeus, Galileo, etc.), newschool booking websites and governments.
While we're at it, how about making shady practices about "last seat available" and "secure your seat" and "sit with your family!" and so forth illegal. "Upgrade to clue!"
Oh fuck NO. Apple has saved me from scummy apps more times than I can remember. They always refund without question, including when I fell for Match.com's "Pay up to see how many bots like you" scam.
Right now I'm fighting to get my money back from Couchsurfing.com (they started throwing a "COVID contribution" prompt on the app and the website that blocks you from doing anything, can't even delete your account until you pay) and they're flat out ignoring me. They use a custom payments system. If it was a regular In-App Purchase, Apple would have refunded me within hours by now.
Anyone clamoring for the protections of the App Store to be abolished is very likely someone salivating to prey upon users.
I don't think it's a problem. Developers that develop for Windows collectively make far more money than Microsoft does. Windows is a platform and Microsoft does a good job of being a platform.
While Microsoft bundles, it's not problematic like Google or Apple. Their way of doing things is different.
The problem with the smart phone world is that apps are distributed through stores not websites. There isn't any worthy exclusive Windows Store app I can find. Every useful software is available from the websites.
In the smart phone world, as a device manufacturer you have to get Google's blessings. They control the play store. And as a device manufacturer, no play store = no sales.
The app store parasite model needs to end. I get no viruses in years, and I download software from websites all the time on Windows 10.
The expectation that the EU can have this much influence over American firms, to the point that they can break them up and change their business models is a pretty shocking development.
We're beginning to see the limitations of globalization. For all the anti-trust rhetoric from the US, it's unlikely it'll accept this level of over-reach without pushing back. Imagine a US company getting approval for a merger from the US and not getting approval from the EU, what happens then? Can China also grant itself this level of influence over American business?
We're definitely in the beginning stages of a new world order that's far less cohesive, with distributed levels of influence.
Are they really "American" firms in anything but name? Once they go multinational, they lose their allegiance to their "native" countries. I don't see any evidence of loyalty to their home countries, per se. Not even in the most basic sense of paying their fair due of taxes.
I don't think it's shocking at all. Every market is free to regulate itself however it sees fit, regardless of what "nationality" players on it have. It's interesting hardly anyone blinks an eye when that regulation allows "American" companies to save costs in developing countries but there are complaints when it disadvantages those companies, often for the same kinds of regulation: labour and environmental.
> Imagine a US company getting approval for a merger from the US and not getting approval from the EU, what happens then? Can China also grant itself this level of influence over American business?
Both of these are already the status quo even before this law
I love how these tech companies are under scrutiny, yet the telecoms with US duopolies are being conveniently ignored. imo this is a lesson for those companies to massively increase their investment in lobbying.
The idea that there is monopoly power being leveraged here to prevent other dating sites from being started and grown and be successful has very little evidence behind it.
> For Apple, it's their app store. The app store needs to be eliminated. Apple has a problem with not allowing competing browser engines on iOS and misleading people by saying it's for privacy reason. Eliminating the control of the App store from Apple is going to fix the problem.
In your opinion, what is the real reason for no allowing alternative browsers?
> The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google
I like this idea, but more precisely I'd put the index with the crawler as well and only keep the ranking/filtering and display part separate. I'd like to see many "heads" on top of the crawler/indexer.
Travel apps never managed a "The winner takes it all" approach.
Regarding "match". You would be surprised how much fraud exits in the dating industry. How many people get payed to keep paying customers engaged with the app.
Also, just wait until your Tinder gold expries. You will get tons of (hidden) likes.
Alibaba and Tencent would be great candidates. There is no chance China will do anything though, as these companies are their best chance to compete on a global stage. The EU could make a case against them that actually has legs, rather than the U.S. flip flopping on TikToking
Regarding Apple, just break it into a hardware + software company. All issues will automatically resolve. And it will be better for the environment as a bonus, because devices can be used for a longer time and with multiple purposes.
As an Apple device user that's precisely the last thing I want. The whole reason I buy their product is because how tightly the hardware and software is integrated and for all the benefits that this gets me, as opposed to Android.
I've come to realize this: free markets of winner-take-all products are a losing game for Europe. We're too late to the game, we can't compete with these huge companies, and there's no way to catch up in terms of venture capital. There are structural difficulties, namely that there are 50 very different countries on this continent with completely different languages and cultures. There is no way we can support massive tech companies such as Google, even if they would arise here as startups.
As such, the only reasonable thing to do is to slowly ween ourselves off American tech in favor of letting our our own grow, just like China did. They probably won't be as good, but unless we want to be completely dependent on a foreign power for all our IT, we have no choice. And really, we have no obligation to let American companies pick the fruits of our markets out of some weird sense of "fairness" of free markets. The world is not fair. Of course, there will be retaliations, but for any non-IT tech there are local or Chinese substitutes.
the issue is even deeper. You can't compete without recreating the same issues that those giants already have in the US or China. I don't even want to compete with Facebook just to have European Facebook, it'd suck just as much.
I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth', who are able to moderate their content and comply with laws rather than ignore them, and so on. Companies like this will never compete with American or Chinese giants in a 'free market'. It's like having a green energy company compete with companies that can legally pour their waste into the river.
The EU needs to create rules to reward small companies and to curb large ones. Don't copy "maximal consumer welfare" doctrines or prioritise convenience, promote decentralisation. It looks like there's some good stuff in these new laws, but they don't go far enough yet.
> I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth', who are able to moderate their content and comply with laws rather than ignore them, and so on
Why would smaller companies be better positioned for those things?
> I don't even want to compete with Facebook just to have European Facebook, it'd suck just as much.
I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth'
The EU needs to create rules to reward small companies and to curb large ones.
There's two things the EU could do here: force big companies to split up (so they can't favour their own services) and require social networks to be interoperable (using ActivityPub or similar).
Perhaps it's a losing game for Europe because Europe isn't really a free market. European powers have constantly been imposing all sorts of taxes, restrictions, and sanctions on tech companies that make it an inhospitable place for tech companies to start out. Its telling that many of the European countries that have managed to produce successful startups are those which had to rebuild from scratch after WWII or after the USSR fell. Elsewhere government is too big for its own good and just seems to stifle innovation. America was successful in the 20th century largely because it was so far removed from large and stagnant European governments. Likewise, west coast tech companies are arguably successful today in part because of their distance from an increasingly bloated Washington. Regulations kill innovation.
I'd like to point out that post-WW2 the US had about half of the world's wealth and a ton of labour to produce for the greater world. Regulations or not, they would have dominated either way. The US's success, I'd argue, is more about their position in the world at that point in time rather than some ideological "regulations vs innovation" battle.
I think a big factor you're missing here is that many of the regulations in Europe are around the public's (and workers) rights, health and wellbeing.
For example it's difficult to create a startup in France because it's very difficult to discipline or fire anyone, and tech workers are used to clocking off at 5pm and having 35+ holiday days per year.
This means that no one's creating these epic billion dollar companies in a hurry, but at the same time the populous is defended, healthy, and not overworked. As opposed to the US where often a company's rise comes at the cost of a wealth of underpaid and mistreated workers (Amazon, Uber, we could go on).
To use an intentionally extreme analogy, your argument feels like sitting around watching the US build lovely tall pyramids with slave labour, saying that Europe's regulations get in the way of it building such tall pyramids. Well, yes, of course, the US is better, if all you're measuring is the height of the pyramids. (nevermind that the US is the easily the biggest user of slave (penal) labour outside of China)
It seems like US workers and the US public lose out on almost every other measurement.
These are definitely important factors, and Europe would be in much better shape if it did things right. But I think the geographical features are more important. An American company can grow big locally and then wash over the European market when it's reached maturity. In the meantime, European startups start off in their tiny local market, perhaps 10M, unable to compete in the US, but not big enough to easily expand to the rest of Europe. If for some reason you still succeed, now you have to recruit tens of thousands of people to move to your tiny little country, with a different culture and language. It's not easy to recruit people to move to Stockholm to work for Spotify, not only because of the weather, but also because who wants to spend the energy to learn Swedish for a single job? The alternative is to never really integrate into society.
That seems awfully defeatist. Spotify is winning in music, for example. And that's certainly a case where the different languages make a big difference.
European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate. And that's the root of the tech issues, in that the culture doesn't foster risk taking.
Jury's still out on that one, Apple Music is making very large in roads, and Spotify is starting to struggle.
It quite possible for the statement "the US have greater cultural homogeneity than the EU" to true alongside the statement:
> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate.
And I would argue that's exactly the case. Having been in startup that seriously looked at expanding in the US vs expanding in the rest of the EU (it expanded into the US), I'm confident to say the US is far more homogenous. Interestingly that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easier for an EU company to expand the US rather than the EU. But it does mean that EU startups have a much larger bump in the road than US companies when they're expanding.
> That seems awfully defeatist. Spotify is winning in music, for example
I'm just a realist. Spotify is not big by comparison. I just looked up a list of the 30 most highly valuated America, and the least valuable was bigger than Spotify.
> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate
I've lived in both and it's just no comparison. What differences you find within the US you find within single European countries. The fact is that an American startup can target a huge, homogeneous and rich country with barely any extra work.
> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate. And that's the root of the tech issues, in that the culture doesn't foster risk taking.
It's also a lot different than American culture -- I've long maintained that as far as cultural attitudes and preferences go, a person from New York has more in common with someone from Mexico City or Sao Paolo than someone from Paris or London.
It's an interesting perspective but it doesn't quite capture the relationship here.
I believe most of those big companies fed from Europe but not only from a market perspective but from a technological perspective.
Contrary to what the media try to depict, most of the tech on which those companies are built were designed in Europe and most of the brain that lead them studied in Europe.
I believe Americans are the best to market an idea, as they mostly focus on optimizing for the product market fit. Which produce the biggest market capitalizations.
But long term planning is still mostly done in Europe as it's considered too expensive almost everwhere else in the world, particularly in the states where remnants from the cold war makes the concept of the government pooling money to fund big projects a politicaly incorrect idea.
So the next logical step will be that like last time Americans will not produce anything meaningful for next 20 years which will give the time to Europe to capitalize on their previous innovations and to produce the next generation of ideas, and the cycle will repeat.
But if we wanted to increase the pace of those innovations, some bipartite solutions could be imagined...
I am European and I live in the US. I would like to ask for more proof of your assertion that most of the tech on which big tech is built originated in Europe.
In the US it is taken for granted that there has been a virtuous cycle between public research money, research universities, venture capital and tech companies. My impression is that most of the tech originates in this ecosystem.
Russia, with a GDP about equivalent to Spain's, successfully nurtured its own infrastructure, search engine, social network, etc. The only thing hampering EU until now was lack of political will.
Try convincing tens of thousands of engineers to learn Polish, Estonian or Dutch. Some will do it, or are fine living in a country without speaking the language, but surely it puts a wet blanket on job market mobility. It's a hard sell: "Come to Stockholm to work with us, learn a new language that is useless anywhere else, and adapt to our culture or be forever an outsider. Oh, and your next job might be in Denmark, so do it all over again."
Google has 120,000 employees today. You may find half of that in Germany, France or the UK, but not in the rest of the 40-ish countries scattered throughout the continent.
> Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems.
Totally agree, especially chips. This one is the hardest though.
ARM was until recently a European company. This is part of the dynamic - some companies in the US have huge piles of cash. If a European company gets successful enough, there'll be interest from a large US company in acquiring it.
> there are 50 very different countries on this continent with completely different languages and cultures. There is no way we can support massive tech companies such as Google, even if they would arise here as startups.
These 50 countries are so different (sarcasm) culturally and linguistically that in every single one of them almost everybody uses the same Google ;-)
I wouldn't mind using a Dutch search engine or a Portuguese social network if they were nearly as good.
I don't understand how is it harder to engineer a better search engine (or anything) in the EU than in the US.
> Tech giants could be entirely banned from the EU market over "serious and repeated breaches of law," AFP reported.
If this comes to pass as described, this is a landslide shift in mentality. Paying fines for shady practices will no longer simply be the cost of doing business, but there's a real risk of being locked out of a major market.
I agree. Spain did this with river toxic waste. Companies found that it was cheaper to leak everything into the river and pay the fine than to fix the problem. Then the law was changed, if you pollute the river you need to shut down until is fixed. That works. Rivers health improved by a lot.
if the fine was the actual cleanup fee (which is an almost unlimited number given hor hard it is) then I think that would work too.
The risk is that too large fines are bankruptcy events so companies gamble on polluting and then shut down after making a few years of profit. Companies that get environmental permits such as mines or chemical industry, should have to deposit the money required to restore the environment - even after bankruptcy.
> Paying fines for shady practices will no longer simply be the cost of doing business, but there's a real risk of being locked out of a major market.
Yes! And that's how it should be.
A fine is just a permission slip for rich people.
Since e.g. Apple holds something like $200b in cash, fines are anti-competitive in this field. A small player can't afford to risk a fine; Apple can pay any level of fine, if it ultimately needs to.
If (in the US) corporations are people, then clearly corporations should face the prospect of ending their existence if they make an egregious-enough violation: the corporate death penalty.
That's the beauty of it being an EU-level regulation: each national party can plausibly deny being "the party that got Facebook banned", and pretends it's "because of those technocrats in Brussels."
That being said, of course Google and FB are never going to be banned in the EU. They'll lobby to death to get the regulation to be "reasonable", and they'll mostly comply because they want their part of the advertising market, and they'll pay the fines when they get caught.
Google would upset a lot of people, but I think quite a lot of people would be quite happy with a Facebook ban. Even quite heavy users of Facebook/Instagram seem to recognise the unhealthy effects it has on them.
More likely the EU would negotiate with the companies rather than outright ban them.
That's the point of doing it at EU level (and I think a contributing factor to Brexit): there is no party doing it, it is done via consensus on EU level.
And on the local level, the politicians blame the EU for it.
When the privacy commission in my country acted against facebook, it retaliated by issuing a country wide ban [1].
As far as I can tell, this had no noticable effect on the political parties. I think you are overestimating the power of large tech companies to influence foreign EU democracies.
There are other examples, including one involving google, where they tried to block access to certain services and expected the population to blame their government.
Unless you can give me a counter example, I think it's more likely people will blame the tech company.
It's not like the products will disappear. Rather they will likely be split into different companies that wields far less power. I highly doubt the average european consumer will care if whatsapp is its own company again or instagram for that matter. Likewise with the various google product groups.
Buying competitors, actions which are already well regulated and overseen by the FTC? And European bodies?
And then ... ?
Giving away software for free?
The populism is getting way out of hand.
First, if there are some anti-competitive issues to address, the EU should do that, but it's hard to do in retrospect.
Google / Chrome / Android is an obvious one, Apple's issue with App Store another, but Facebook / Insta / What's a much less obvious one.
Second, the real underlying issue is Europe's failure to produce anything material in this landscape. They have almost no winners and are being dominated, these are the acts of system with a weak hand. If SAP and a bunch of other European companies dominated the US landscape, this legislation would be different.
There are a lot of unexpected side effects lurking in those sort of decisions. For example Apple developed Pages, Numbers and Keynote because nobody else was able to compete against Microsoft. It's hard to see the computing environment would be better off without those products.
You can argue that someone else would fill that gap but they didn't really seem to be doing that before Apple stepped in. In fact I would guess that Apple would have preferred not to have developed them, it's not as if they generate any direct revenue.
It only dictates you’re not allowed to favor your own products. I think Apple is already in a good position here since these are all on the normal App Store next to MS Office. The only thing they could not do is unfairly promote them on the store and ship them pre-installed.
Whats even the point of becoming a Google or Apple if then some clueless bureaucrat gets to tell you what you are allowed to do with your market position? Nobody is stopping other companies to build their own Android or iPhone, its working as intended, no reason to do anything.
This is an incredibly hard thing to legislate. Almost every company does some level of vertical integration, and it's often good to the consumer. Still you want to prevent locking down and monopolies or even oligopolies.
Would Apple itself be here if Microsoft didn't port Office to their OS?
European anti trust law is a lot simpler than US since there are a lot less details and judges get to use more common sense when judging companies. For example EU already fixed the credit card duopoly while US still hasn't managed to do anything about it. Note EU didn't broke it up, just force them to massively reduce their fees, it is very likely they will do something similar with the app store.
Microsoft ported part of Office to Windows. Excel for Mac is from 1985, the first Windows version from 1987 (you could say both evolved from DOS Multiplan, but that was on Mac, too); Word was on DOS in 1983, Mac in 1985, Windows in 1989.
They would simply have to move a bunch of frameworks from /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks to /System/Library/Frameworks, remove signature checks, and provide documentation.
What I dont understand is why they keep allowing mergers for those huge companies in the first place.
Maybe there should be a certain company size where they are not allowed to merge with new companies any more!!
I think a majority of mergers 'just happen' because they are not challenged. To stop a merger, some regulating body needs to hear about it and take action in time. They can also investigate and dismantle monopolies after the fact, but then we see long legal battles.
Also size-based limits would be hard to create/enforce. IBM has about 350K employees wordwide. McDonalds has about 200K. Google has about 100K. Amazon 1.1M. Do you look at market cap? The industry specifically?
It's a complex problem, that's why there is no simple solution.
A lot of large mergers and acquisitons were, in fact, reviewed and approved by bodies that exist to do precisely that. Facebook's acquisition of Instagram was reviewed. I expect their acquisition of Whatsapp was as well.
> Facebook and other firms have warned that the more regulation could prompt the company to move away from Europe, which could cost jobs and block access to its site for EU users.
Well put it like this: In China the government dictate what you can see and the EU approach is that the government legislate what you can be shown.
I don't see any of the major players having a hissy fit and walking away from that kinda user-base. Though the prospect of large companies hiding behind firewalls to protect themselves from EU users, does bemuse me.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I think that unlike some other markets (China and to some extent other Asian countries / Russia / etc) it's surprising how dependent the EU is on US corporations for digital services. As said the EU anti-monopolies chief Margrethe Vestager: "In the past few weeks we have all been fascinated by what is possible digitally. But the coronavirus showed how dependent we are on US corporations, and that was a wake-up call,".
I might be overthinking this but I find her wording a bit concerning if they weren't fully awake to this dependency pre-pandemic. Everyone knows where Microsoft/Google/Amazon/Apple are based and these companies generally are operating under their own names so it's not like a shady conglomerate who owns everything without you realising.
Anecdotal and hardly conclusive but I work in UK local government and we get a weekly email from our web proxy showing the top 50 domains by proxy traffic in that period. The usual split is something like 42 domains that are linked to US companies, 5 are UK companies with the remainder being the rest of the world (including the EU). That's been the case for years now.
It gives cover to those who dismissed the concern pre-covid.
It's common for a pragmatic 'Cassandra' to point to the newest evidence as permission for people to finally wake up to the problem rather than berating them for not paying attention any earlier.
Yeah, that doesn't make any sense with all the poltician's discussions over the recent years about the GAFA tax. (Whoopsie, we dropped the M. Can't be antagonizing the maker of our hospital and army software!)
It is part of the German public broadcasting but as I just learned actually not financed by the fee every German household has to pay. It is financed directly by the German state.
I will use this in the future as an example for this simpler (and cheaper) system working just fine.
I would add that despite the funding coming from the government,
> The work of DW is regulated by the Deutsche Welle Act, meaning that content is intended to be independent of government influence [0]
Specifically, the supervisory board of Deutsche Welle consists of 7 members that get elected by the parliament and the acting federal government and another 10 members that come from non-profit organizations like labor unions, religious groups, cultural and sports organizations, among others.[1]
Readit News
1. Alphabet/Google
2. Apple
3. Facebook
4. Match Group
Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.
Reasons:
For Google, the biggest problem is their bundling of Chrome, YouTube, Gmail if you want to have Google certified android phone that has the Google play store. Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.
For Apple, it's their app store. The app store needs to be eliminated. Apple has a problem with not allowing competing browser engines on iOS and misleading people by saying it's for privacy reason. Eliminating the control of the App store from Apple is going to fix the problem.
For Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp should be spun off to their own entities.
For Match group, break off tinder into a separate company. And prevent any future dating app accusations by Match group or Tinder. NO MERGERS.
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From the Chinese side:
I'd like to see Alibaba group and Tencent being investigated.
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Edit: replying to calls below for travel industry.
The travel industry is already competitive enough, and the situation in these areas should be reviewed after a year or two.
For now, these are the critical problems for tech. Their control is taking the breath away from smaller companies and reducing innovation.
> Match group is lucky they're not getting much attention, but they own all major dating apps. They need a bit of smacking.
I had never heard that name and just googled them. HOOOOLLLYYY COW!!!!!!! That's what I call monopoly.
Doesn't seem terribly monopolized to me, especially if you factor in that one person often uses multiple of those apps.
...so duopoly??
I think it's much more than that.
Google makes apps and services. Google makes the platforms apps run on (Android, ChromeOS, Chrome [web + electron], Stadia). Google makes the services used to monetize apps (AdSense). Google makes the services used to distribute apps (Google Play Store, Stadia). Google makes the services used to find apps and services (Google Search, Google Maps, Google Play Store). And that's not to mention the deployment platforms, communication platforms, payment platforms, analytics platforms, development tools, content hosting services, etc.
They have so much control that you can't hope to compete with any of their established apps or services - no matter how much better your own product might be. All you can to is try to make something new and get big enough that Google can't take you on directly.
Android was motivated to compete with Apple. The Play Store and Chrome Web Store required platform ownership for integration and optimization. Intertwined services demand mutual optimization. Many other Google products would likely struggle as startups, requiring massive scale to become profitable, if even possible. Most only exist because ads pay for them and they may contribute to improving ads.
Over the past 10 years, how many companies chose to build native apps for iOS instead of web apps running everywhere? How many people bought iOS devices instead of competing products because of that rich app ecosystem (working only on iOS devices)? How much money did they make through the App Store fee that app developers could have saved if Web Apps had been a viable option? How much money was poured in the native industry instead of the Web?
Apple has been preventing the growth of the Web as an app platform for years, it's time for a change, and it's time they pay for it.
Google seems iffier, since Chrome at least would never be viable as a standalone product (as the fates of Mozilla and Opera have taught us).
Totally agree that Match group is an interesting under-the-radar one. It's shocking how much of the market they control with all their "competing" apps.
Firefox has been viable as a standalone product for over a decade because Google pays for being the default search engine. This is roughly viable with Chrome being around, it would be even more viable if Chrome was not around.
You can't compete with Chrome when your primary merit is simply not being Google. Forcing Google to spin-off Chrome should have been done earlier though, before Microsoft had a stake on the engine. Now additional steps need to be taken to ensure that spinning off Chrome will not actually kill competition; with an independent Chrome, we can count on Google cutting down on Mozilla's funding since Google wouldn't be any longer in danger of being ruled as a browser monopoly.
I wonder if this means that we should all start starting dating app companies, given that apparently it's a guaranteed sale if you can attract enough users. We could start the "match group group," stamping out standardized dating apps and putting proven amounts of brand-building effort into each one, and selling them to Match Group at a repeatable price.
“ Google should be prevented from having their own WWW crawler too. The crawler should be made into it's own company and data should be purchased by Google and any other company that want to purchase it at the same costs.”
I know someone working on DOJ’s case vs G search, yet I haven’t heard any decent proposals to solve the problem. This is one. Simple and could spark a lot of innovation. (Probably has drawbacks that I haven’t considered yet.)
The harder problem is what you do with the result of the crawl once you have it. You need to index it. This is one of Google's deepest moats. Being able to serve any of hundreds of billions of documents in milliseconds requires an enormous amount of infrastructure and hundreds of careers worth of difficult software engineering.
I don't see a good way to split indexing out as a separate company from the rest of the search engine. It's tightly integrated with ranking. Generally a new ranking technique requires some new information to be associated with each document in the index, e.g. some precomputed scores that describe the document's quality or fitness for different kinds of queries. At query time, you're often just weighting and comparing these scores across documents.
If you had Google's index, you'd be a long way towards being able to replicate Google's results, but I don't think that would lead to the kind of innovation you're hoping for.
For site owners, it may prove to be lower maintenance to simply whitelist such a bot for crawling, though on the downside they may want to pick and choose which search engines can index it, and since the crawl (assumedly) would use one UA it would complicate how site owners can tell respective search engines what they're allowed to do with the crawl data.
While we're at it, how about making shady practices about "last seat available" and "secure your seat" and "sit with your family!" and so forth illegal. "Upgrade to clue!"
Oh fuck NO. Apple has saved me from scummy apps more times than I can remember. They always refund without question, including when I fell for Match.com's "Pay up to see how many bots like you" scam.
Right now I'm fighting to get my money back from Couchsurfing.com (they started throwing a "COVID contribution" prompt on the app and the website that blocks you from doing anything, can't even delete your account until you pay) and they're flat out ignoring me. They use a custom payments system. If it was a regular In-App Purchase, Apple would have refunded me within hours by now.
Anyone clamoring for the protections of the App Store to be abolished is very likely someone salivating to prey upon users.
They own Windows + Internet Explorer/Edge + Bing and a lot of internet services.
I think it's problematic that Skype gets auto-installed eery time Windows updates.
While Microsoft bundles, it's not problematic like Google or Apple. Their way of doing things is different.
The problem with the smart phone world is that apps are distributed through stores not websites. There isn't any worthy exclusive Windows Store app I can find. Every useful software is available from the websites.
In the smart phone world, as a device manufacturer you have to get Google's blessings. They control the play store. And as a device manufacturer, no play store = no sales.
The app store parasite model needs to end. I get no viruses in years, and I download software from websites all the time on Windows 10.
We're beginning to see the limitations of globalization. For all the anti-trust rhetoric from the US, it's unlikely it'll accept this level of over-reach without pushing back. Imagine a US company getting approval for a merger from the US and not getting approval from the EU, what happens then? Can China also grant itself this level of influence over American business?
We're definitely in the beginning stages of a new world order that's far less cohesive, with distributed levels of influence.
I don't think it's shocking at all. Every market is free to regulate itself however it sees fit, regardless of what "nationality" players on it have. It's interesting hardly anyone blinks an eye when that regulation allows "American" companies to save costs in developing countries but there are complaints when it disadvantages those companies, often for the same kinds of regulation: labour and environmental.
Both of these are already the status quo even before this law
- Bumble
- Badoo
- Eharmony
- Zoosk
- ChrstianMingle
- JDate
- tons of international and niche sites and apps
- many, many others
The idea that there is monopoly power being leveraged here to prevent other dating sites from being started and grown and be successful has very little evidence behind it.
If you agree that Apple should be on the list, then Match Group should without question be on the list.
In your opinion, what is the real reason for no allowing alternative browsers?
I like this idea, but more precisely I'd put the index with the crawler as well and only keep the ranking/filtering and display part separate. I'd like to see many "heads" on top of the crawler/indexer.
Regarding "match". You would be surprised how much fraud exits in the dating industry. How many people get payed to keep paying customers engaged with the app. Also, just wait until your Tinder gold expries. You will get tons of (hidden) likes.
Microsoft
They might be the ones who finally push it for mainstream adoption, then PayPal can go kick rocks.
If it fails, then maaaybe we could think about it. Still not as bad as these 4 major offenders.
As such, the only reasonable thing to do is to slowly ween ourselves off American tech in favor of letting our our own grow, just like China did. They probably won't be as good, but unless we want to be completely dependent on a foreign power for all our IT, we have no choice. And really, we have no obligation to let American companies pick the fruits of our markets out of some weird sense of "fairness" of free markets. The world is not fair. Of course, there will be retaliations, but for any non-IT tech there are local or Chinese substitutes.
the issue is even deeper. You can't compete without recreating the same issues that those giants already have in the US or China. I don't even want to compete with Facebook just to have European Facebook, it'd suck just as much.
I want smaller companies, which don't abuse data, which don't sacrifice security for 'hypergrowth', who are able to moderate their content and comply with laws rather than ignore them, and so on. Companies like this will never compete with American or Chinese giants in a 'free market'. It's like having a green energy company compete with companies that can legally pour their waste into the river.
The EU needs to create rules to reward small companies and to curb large ones. Don't copy "maximal consumer welfare" doctrines or prioritise convenience, promote decentralisation. It looks like there's some good stuff in these new laws, but they don't go far enough yet.
Why would smaller companies be better positioned for those things?
There's two things the EU could do here: force big companies to split up (so they can't favour their own services) and require social networks to be interoperable (using ActivityPub or similar).
For example it's difficult to create a startup in France because it's very difficult to discipline or fire anyone, and tech workers are used to clocking off at 5pm and having 35+ holiday days per year.
This means that no one's creating these epic billion dollar companies in a hurry, but at the same time the populous is defended, healthy, and not overworked. As opposed to the US where often a company's rise comes at the cost of a wealth of underpaid and mistreated workers (Amazon, Uber, we could go on).
To use an intentionally extreme analogy, your argument feels like sitting around watching the US build lovely tall pyramids with slave labour, saying that Europe's regulations get in the way of it building such tall pyramids. Well, yes, of course, the US is better, if all you're measuring is the height of the pyramids. (nevermind that the US is the easily the biggest user of slave (penal) labour outside of China)
It seems like US workers and the US public lose out on almost every other measurement.
European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate. And that's the root of the tech issues, in that the culture doesn't foster risk taking.
Jury's still out on that one, Apple Music is making very large in roads, and Spotify is starting to struggle.
It quite possible for the statement "the US have greater cultural homogeneity than the EU" to true alongside the statement:
> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate.
And I would argue that's exactly the case. Having been in startup that seriously looked at expanding in the US vs expanding in the rest of the EU (it expanded into the US), I'm confident to say the US is far more homogenous. Interestingly that doesn't necessarily mean that it's easier for an EU company to expand the US rather than the EU. But it does mean that EU startups have a much larger bump in the road than US companies when they're expanding.
I'm just a realist. Spotify is not big by comparison. I just looked up a list of the 30 most highly valuated America, and the least valuable was bigger than Spotify.
> European culture is more homogeneous than I think a lot of people in Europe appreciate
I've lived in both and it's just no comparison. What differences you find within the US you find within single European countries. The fact is that an American startup can target a huge, homogeneous and rich country with barely any extra work.
It's also a lot different than American culture -- I've long maintained that as far as cultural attitudes and preferences go, a person from New York has more in common with someone from Mexico City or Sao Paolo than someone from Paris or London.
I believe most of those big companies fed from Europe but not only from a market perspective but from a technological perspective.
Contrary to what the media try to depict, most of the tech on which those companies are built were designed in Europe and most of the brain that lead them studied in Europe.
I believe Americans are the best to market an idea, as they mostly focus on optimizing for the product market fit. Which produce the biggest market capitalizations.
But long term planning is still mostly done in Europe as it's considered too expensive almost everwhere else in the world, particularly in the states where remnants from the cold war makes the concept of the government pooling money to fund big projects a politicaly incorrect idea.
So the next logical step will be that like last time Americans will not produce anything meaningful for next 20 years which will give the time to Europe to capitalize on their previous innovations and to produce the next generation of ideas, and the cycle will repeat.
But if we wanted to increase the pace of those innovations, some bipartite solutions could be imagined...
In the US it is taken for granted that there has been a virtuous cycle between public research money, research universities, venture capital and tech companies. My impression is that most of the tech originates in this ecosystem.
I don't see why not. The EU's GDP is almost as big as the USA's, and the EU has plenty of educated people who understand the relevant technologies.
> As such, the only reasonable thing to do is to slowly ween ourselves off American tech in favor of letting our our own grow, just like China did.
Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems.
Try convincing tens of thousands of engineers to learn Polish, Estonian or Dutch. Some will do it, or are fine living in a country without speaking the language, but surely it puts a wet blanket on job market mobility. It's a hard sell: "Come to Stockholm to work with us, learn a new language that is useless anywhere else, and adapt to our culture or be forever an outsider. Oh, and your next job might be in Denmark, so do it all over again."
Google has 120,000 employees today. You may find half of that in Germany, France or the UK, but not in the rest of the 40-ish countries scattered throughout the continent.
> Yes. This needs to be done not just for web services and social networks, but for the whole technology stack including chips and operating systems.
Totally agree, especially chips. This one is the hardest though.
ARM was until recently a European company. This is part of the dynamic - some companies in the US have huge piles of cash. If a European company gets successful enough, there'll be interest from a large US company in acquiring it.
These 50 countries are so different (sarcasm) culturally and linguistically that in every single one of them almost everybody uses the same Google ;-)
I wouldn't mind using a Dutch search engine or a Portuguese social network if they were nearly as good.
I don't understand how is it harder to engineer a better search engine (or anything) in the EU than in the US.
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If this comes to pass as described, this is a landslide shift in mentality. Paying fines for shady practices will no longer simply be the cost of doing business, but there's a real risk of being locked out of a major market.
The risk is that too large fines are bankruptcy events so companies gamble on polluting and then shut down after making a few years of profit. Companies that get environmental permits such as mines or chemical industry, should have to deposit the money required to restore the environment - even after bankruptcy.
Yes! And that's how it should be.
A fine is just a permission slip for rich people.
Since e.g. Apple holds something like $200b in cash, fines are anti-competitive in this field. A small player can't afford to risk a fine; Apple can pay any level of fine, if it ultimately needs to.
If (in the US) corporations are people, then clearly corporations should face the prospect of ending their existence if they make an egregious-enough violation: the corporate death penalty.
Dead Comment
That being said, of course Google and FB are never going to be banned in the EU. They'll lobby to death to get the regulation to be "reasonable", and they'll mostly comply because they want their part of the advertising market, and they'll pay the fines when they get caught.
More likely the EU would negotiate with the companies rather than outright ban them.
(they were still rioting over other issues, just not Amazon)
As far as I can tell, this had no noticable effect on the political parties. I think you are overestimating the power of large tech companies to influence foreign EU democracies.
There are other examples, including one involving google, where they tried to block access to certain services and expected the population to blame their government.
Unless you can give me a counter example, I think it's more likely people will blame the tech company.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/9c9bf084-994f-11e5-95c7-d47aa298f...
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Buying competitors, actions which are already well regulated and overseen by the FTC? And European bodies?
And then ... ?
Giving away software for free?
The populism is getting way out of hand.
First, if there are some anti-competitive issues to address, the EU should do that, but it's hard to do in retrospect.
Google / Chrome / Android is an obvious one, Apple's issue with App Store another, but Facebook / Insta / What's a much less obvious one.
Second, the real underlying issue is Europe's failure to produce anything material in this landscape. They have almost no winners and are being dominated, these are the acts of system with a weak hand. If SAP and a bunch of other European companies dominated the US landscape, this legislation would be different.
Apple would have to significantly redesign their entire OSs if this comes to pass. Will be really interesting to see!
You can argue that someone else would fill that gap but they didn't really seem to be doing that before Apple stepped in. In fact I would guess that Apple would have preferred not to have developed them, it's not as if they generate any direct revenue.
Would Apple itself be here if Microsoft didn't port Office to their OS?
Also size-based limits would be hard to create/enforce. IBM has about 350K employees wordwide. McDonalds has about 200K. Google has about 100K. Amazon 1.1M. Do you look at market cap? The industry specifically?
It's a complex problem, that's why there is no simple solution.
Please, please make it happen...
I don't see any of the major players having a hissy fit and walking away from that kinda user-base. Though the prospect of large companies hiding behind firewalls to protect themselves from EU users, does bemuse me.
Anecdotal and hardly conclusive but I work in UK local government and we get a weekly email from our web proxy showing the top 50 domains by proxy traffic in that period. The usual split is something like 42 domains that are linked to US companies, 5 are UK companies with the remainder being the rest of the world (including the EU). That's been the case for years now.
It's common for a pragmatic 'Cassandra' to point to the newest evidence as permission for people to finally wake up to the problem rather than berating them for not paying attention any earlier.
Surely the pandemic forced them to use some more tech.
Dead Comment
I will use this in the future as an example for this simpler (and cheaper) system working just fine.
I would add that despite the funding coming from the government,
> The work of DW is regulated by the Deutsche Welle Act, meaning that content is intended to be independent of government influence [0]
Specifically, the supervisory board of Deutsche Welle consists of 7 members that get elected by the parliament and the acting federal government and another 10 members that come from non-profit organizations like labor unions, religious groups, cultural and sports organizations, among others.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Welle#Aufsichtsgremie...